Artist-led walkthrough of Ordinary People with Andrea Bowers

Join artist Andrea Bowers for a walkthrough of Ordinary People: Photorealism and the Work of Art since 1968.

The first large-scale exhibition to reexamine the postwar art movement of photorealism and trace its lineages in art of the present day, Ordinary People includes more than forty artists (largely though not exclusively North American), spans the 1960s to the present, and features paintings alongside drawings, sculptures, and archival materials. This historical, scholarly, group exhibition recovers the social art history of photorealism and complicates its meaning as a realism.

Los Angeles based artist Andrea Bowers (b. 1964, Ohio) has been recording and amplifying the work of activists present and past for more than two decades. Her multi-media practice includes drawing, video, sculpture, and installation work that foregrounds the experience of the people who dedicate their time and energy to the struggle for gender, racial, environmental, labor, and immigration justice and those who are directly affected by systemic inequality. Over time, her different bodies of work have become a document of the changing language, prerogatives, and dynamics of social justice movements. In 2021 a major mid- career survey of Bowers’ work curated by Michael Darling and Connie Butler opened at the MCA Chicago and traveled to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in 2022. Other recent solo exhibitions include "Grief and Hope," Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany and Light and Gravity, Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany. In September 2022, Bowers opened a solo exhibition including both new and existing work at the Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Milano as part of an exhibition program organized by the Fondazione Furla. Bowers is represented by Vielmetter Los Angeles, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Kaufmann Repetto, and Jessica Silverman Gallery.

This program is organized by Justen Leroy, Director of Public Programs and Community Outreach, with Alitzah Oros, Public Programming Associate, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.